Inside Beatriz Soria’s mind, thoughts turned busily, as they always did. As she and Daniel moved through the dark, she thought about the casual ingenuity of the portable radio they carried, and also about a time when people had imagined the night air was full of nothing, and also about the expression dead air. And now she thought instead about how really she was pushing through a crowded atomic city of invisible chemicals, microorganisms, and waves, the last of them detectable only because she held this magic box capable of receiving them and spitting them back out for her mortal ears. She leaned into these invisible radio signals as she would a heavy wind, and with one hand she snatched at the air as if she might feel them. This was an impulse that she often had, to touch the invisible. She had learned after years of childhood correction to reserve it for moments when no one else was watching. (Daniel did not count as someone else in this regard.)
But she felt only the slow creep of an approaching miracle. The radio’s signal had begun to fray; another station was gulping a syllable here and there.
“Beatriz?” asked Daniel. His voice sounded a little hollow, a cup with no water in it, a sky without stars. “Do you think consequences are meaningful if we haven’t seen them for ourselves?”
Sometimes, when a question is about a secret, people will ask a different but related question, hoping to get an answer that will work for both questions. Beatriz realized at once that this was what Daniel was doing now. She did not know what to do about the fact of his having secrets, but she answered as best as she could. “I think an untested consequence is a hypothesis.”
“Do you think I’ve been a good saint?”
This was still not really the question in his mind, and in any case, no one who had spent even a minute in Bicho Raro would have possibly spoken against Daniel Lupe Soria’s devotion. “You are a better one than I would be.”
“You could be a fine saint.”
“The evidence doesn’t agree with you.”
“Where is your science?” Daniel asked. “One piece of evidence is not science.” His tone was lighter now, but Beatriz was not comforted. He was not ordinarily troubled, and she could not forget the sound of it in his voice.
Beatriz turned the radio slightly to reduce the crackling. “Some experiments only require one result for proof. Or at least to prove it’s not responsible to perform them a second time.”
Loudening static hung between the two cousins, and eventually, Daniel said, “Did you ever think that maybe we’re doing it wrong? All of us?”
This, finally, was a real question instead of a hidden one, although it was not the real question. But it was too big a puzzle to be answered in only one night.
Further conversation was interrupted by a shudder in the shrub before them. It twitched and shivered again, and then a shadow roared out of it.
Neither Beatriz nor Daniel flinched. This was because they were Sorias. In their family, if you were going to leap at every shadow that suddenly appeared, you needed to plan on some fine calf muscles.
The roar resolved into a great, hushing thud of wings, and the shadow resolved into an enormous bird in flight. It flapped close enough that Beatriz’s hair moved against her cheek: an owl.
Beatriz knew many things about owls. Owls have enormous and powerful eyes, but these remarkable eyeballs are fixed in place by bony protuberances called sclerotic rings. This is why owls must move their heads in all directions in lieu of flicking their eyes from side to side. Several owl species have asymmetrical ears, which allows them to accurately pinpoint the origin of a sound. Many people do not realize that, in addition to possessing powerful vision and hearing, owls are very attracted to miracles, though the mechanism that draws the birds to them is poorly understood.
Daniel leaned close to turn off the radio. The quiet hurried around them.
On the other side of where the owl had appeared, distant headlights came into view. In a place like this, you could go all night without seeing another vehicle, and so it was with interest that Beatriz watched the two tiny lights travel from right to left. It was far too distant to hear, but she knew the sound of tires on the gravel so well that her ears pretended they caught it. She lifted her hand to see if she could feel the sound with her fingers.
Daniel closed his eyes. His mouth moved. He was praying.
“Headlights! Are you two stupid?” Joaquin had grown bored waiting for them to report and now called to them from the open back of the truck. “Headlights! Why didn’t you say right away?! The FCC!”
Beatriz closed her fingers and lowered her hand. She said, “They aren’t headed this way.”
“How can you know?!”
“They’re going to …”
She lifted a vague hand and allowed that gesture to serve as the rest of the sentence.
Joaquin sprang back inside to rip wires from the battery, then leaped back out and began to tear up ground wires with a great and fearful energy. But Beatriz was right, as she often was. The headlights continued on their distant path without pause, illuminating motionless antelope and clumps of grass. The vehicle was headed unerringly toward Bicho Raro. It was hunting not for a radio signal but for a miracle.
Daniel opened his eyes. He said, “I need to get there before they do.”
There would be no miracle without a saint.
There were two people in the vehicle driving toward Bicho Raro that night: Pete Wyatt and Tony DiRisio.
Pete and Tony had run into each other in western Kansas many long hours before. Not literally, but nearly. Pete had been hitchhiking alongside endless prairie, slow-motion counting the mile markers out loud four or five times an hour, when a big owl flew right overhead, making him jump a few inches. A second later, a car skidded into the space Pete had just been occupying. Tony had rolled down the window, peered through the cloud of dust and gravel, and demanded, “What’s my name?” When Pete had confessed that he didn’t know, Tony’s expression had cleared. “You’ll have to drive,” Tony said, unbuckling his seat belt, “because I’m too high.”
This was how Pete, a kid who had driven his father’s sedan only a few dozen times since getting his license, found himself piloting an aggressively unattractive Mercury station wagon painted an overdone egg-yolk yellow. Tony DiRisio liked large cars. When he’d visited the Philadelphia car dealership to purchase it, he had brought only a tape measure and his checkbook. He felt there was a permanence to a car that was over seventeen feet long and covered with wood paneling.
Tony himself was handsome as a cigarette. Currently, he wore a white suit and dark sideburns. Both had appeared stylish at one point, but by the time Pete met him, they were rumpled. He had been driving the Mercury for five days and driving himself for longer. He was only thirty-four, but he had lived all of those years twice, once as Tony DiRisio and once as Tony Triumph. After surviving a childhood too boring to repeat in polite company, he’d become a DJ at an easy listening station too boring to play in polite company. Over the past few years, he had transformed himself and the station into a household fixture by the expedient of bringing random housewives into the station to play their pick of the hour. He became a hunted man; Philadelphia women now sought him in grocery aisles and on neighborhood sidewalks, hoping to catch his eye. The local rag ran pieces analyzing the type of woman he was likely to invite: what they’d been wearing when discovered (shoes without heels, mostly), how they had worn their hair (often in rollers), and how old they’d been (usually over fifty). The headline mused, “Does Tony Triumph Want His Mother?”
Here was a thing he wanted: to stop having dreams of being laughed at by tiny birds with very long legs. Here was a thing he feared: people watching him while he ate.
He also missed his mother.
Pete Wyatt didn’t know any of this about Tony. He was not an easy listening fan and had never been east of the Mississippi anyway. He was only a few weeks out of high school, a clean-cut fellow with dull brown hair and bright brown eyes and reasonably tidy fingernails. Although he was more than a decade younger than Tony, he had been born old, already a good rock to build a church from the moment he first rolled out of his mother.
He was one of those folks who couldn’t avoid helping. At twelve, he’d organized a canned food drive and set a world record for the most pounds of creamed corn ever donated to the poor. At fifteen, struck by the unspoken misery of being a friendless child, he had saved up enough money to give every first grader in his old school a baby chick. A miscommunication with the newspaper covering the story had resulted in three Indiana poultry farms doubling and then tripling and then quadrupling the donations. Two thousand chicks had arrived in Pete’s hometown, one for every student in his school system, plus three extra. He’d trained those three to do tricks for old folks’ homes.